The Sixth-Floor Staircase
by HarmonyPie714
Summary: For some aggravating reason, all of the girls in Hogwarts insist upon moving in packs. One day the castle takes pity on Harry, and he comes to an important realization.


**A/N: Takes place during fourth year. I'm probably not going to continue it, but you never know. Also, I own nothing. Enjoy.  
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It was a windy, rainy early December day, and Harry was unable to shake the feeling of dampness from his body. Normally he didn't mind having Herbology, but the trek back from the greenhouse in the cold drizzle wasn't exactly uplifting. He, Ron and Hermione were on their way to the common-room now to drop off their books before dinner.

"Is that Krum?" Ron said, looking down the hallway at a group of Durmstrang students. "I think it is... Harry you don't mind, do you?"

Ron quickly shoved his stack of books on top of Harry's and rushed off in pursuit of the famous Seeker.

"Typical," Hermione muttered softly. It wasn't the first time that Ron had done this, or even the second. He'd already gotten Krum to autograph a couple of scraps of parchment, as well as, for some strange reason, his potions book.

"Do you think Krum's gotten that restraining order yet?" Harry asked jokingly as he and Hermione started up the grand staircase.

She smirked. "I know I would have."

The pair stepped from the main staircase onto the one leading to the Gryffindor common-room when it began to rotate. All of the castle's stairs were supposedly enchanted to only move to the direction that the students on it wanted it to, but the stairs had been moving of their own free will for as long as Harry could remember. The charm had probably worn off at some point in the last thousand years.

Harry sighed, leaning against the railing as the Great Hall moved around him. As he waited he tried, not for the first time today, to dry his robes with a Hot-Air Charm.

"You've got the wrong hand movement," Hermione said, walking over to him.

The staircase came to a sudden, jarring, stop, as if it had hit an invisible wall. Hermione stumbled, crashing into Harry with her arms outstretched, nearly knocking him over the railing. He just managed to keep his balance, his hands tightly gripping the railing behind him.

"Are you ok?" he asked Hermione, helping her pick up the books that she had dropped. "The stairs don't usually stop that suddenly."

"They don't usually stop here, either," she replied.

Harry looked around, realizing that the staircase hadn't stopped where it should have. It was exactly halfway between its two normal positions. It hovered in mid-air, completely disconnected from the rest of the staircases, and seemed to have every intention of staying there. He gave the railing a slight shove, thinking he could maybe push the stairs back into alignment, but they didn't budge. "I think it's stuck," he said, rather obviously.

Hermione was reaching for her wand. "I might be able to levitate us over to the landing," she said, the wand pointed at Harry.

"No!" he said quickly, panicking. "Not that I don't have faith in your magic, but I think it'd be safer to wait. Someone's bound to come by, and then they'll get a professor to sort it out. This must happen all the time, it'll probably just take them a second."

Sure enough, a couple of first-years had stopped at the landing that the staircase was supposed to connect to, pointing up at the pair. "What are you doing up there?" one of them asked, a girl with short, curly brown hair.

"We're stuck," Harry said, probably unnecessarily. "Could you please go get a professor to get us down from here?"

The two first-years ran off, leaving Harry and Hermione alone on the staircase, hovering between the fifth and sixth floors.

"We're going to be late for dinner," Harry said after a while, breaking the silence.

"You sound just like Ron," Hermione replied, leaning on the railing opposite Harry. Harry's stomach rumbled, quite a bit more loudly than he would have liked. "Sounds just like Ron too," she quipped.

Harry smiled. At least I'm not obsessed with Krum, he thought. It was really rather amusing to watch Ron chase down his idol, elbowing second-year girls out of his way. Although, pretty soon Harry would have to do some chasing of his own. The Yule Ball was now under a month away, and Harry still needed a date. It wasn't that he was too scared to ask a girl, he just hadn't had the chance. Well, maybe there was a little fear involved. Every time he saw Cho his brain just slowed down to the point where he had trouble stringing together normal-sounding sentences. And then there was the fact that she always traveled in a pack of other girls, each more giggly than the last. Harry swore they were making fun of him, as they always seemed to draw quiet when he walked by. He was beginning to think it was more trouble than it was worth. Cho was, by Harry's reckoning at least, the prettiest girl in her year, which meant that by now she probably had a date. Besides, he didn't even know her; they'd never had a conversation longer than five seconds.

"Galleon for your thoughts?" Hermione asked.

"Nothing much," he lied, "just thinking about Quidditch."

She looked at him intently, her left eyebrow arched. "You seemed awfully deep in thought to just be thinking about Quidditch."

"It's a complicated sport," he said defensively.

Hermione rolled her eyes. "So who are you going to ask to the ball?"

For a fleeting moment Harry wondered if she had learned to read minds.

"How did you know what I was thinking about?"

"It's what every boy in fourth-year and up is thinking about right now, unless they've already got a date."

She was right. "I haven't really decided yet," he replied, truthfully.

"You should make up your mind soon then, or-"

"All the good ones will be gone," he finished, remembering what Ron had said to him a couple of days ago.

"Actually, I was going to say that you'd end up going with the giant squid."

"Do you think it would even fit through the doors in the Great Hall?" Harry asked, laughing. "They might have to take a wall out."

The two first years returned, accompanied by Professor McGonagall.

"Ah, yes," she said, "the sixth-floor staircase. Now what seems to be the problem, Potter?"

Why did people keep asking him that? Wasn't it obvious that they were stuck up here?

"We're trapped up here, Professor," Hermione answered.

"Hmm… so you are."

Professor McGonagall took out her wand, walking up to the edge of the landing.

"Cupios Revelio."

A streak of something red shot from her wand, flying past Harry, and then swooping back around like a boomerang. It stopped in front of McGonagall, hovering for a brief moment, and then it dissolved into a cloud of red sparks, which drifted to the ground. She observed them for a moment before speaking.

"I'm afraid there's nothing I can do. You'll just have to wait it out."

"What do you mean, wait it out?" Harry asked.

"I expect the stairs will give up eventually. You'll have to excuse me; I don't want to be late for dinner."

She turned and walked back down towards the Great Hall. There seemed to be a slight spring in her step, as if she'd just had a particularly fortunate stroke of luck. The first-years followed her, no more willing to miss dinner.

Hermione sat down, digging a textbook out of her bag.

"Might as well get some work done," she explained. "It sounds like we could be here for a while."

Harry sat down as well, his brain spinning with thoughts, trying to figure out what McGonagall had meant. She had said that they'd have to wait until the stairs gave up. Gave up what? She made it sound like they were sentient, that this was some conscious decision on their part to trap him and Hermione. It didn't seem likely, but then Hogwarts could be a weird place sometimes. Harry had his Herbology notes with him, and he did have a short essay on the properties of Bubotubers that was due in a couple of days, but he couldn't bring himself to work on an empty stomach. With nothing else to do, he sat on the stair and watched Hermione work. She had spread her notes out in front of her, dozens of pages filled with handwriting so small he was amazed she could read it, and her inkpot balanced precariously on her knee. She would keep the feathered end of the quill up against her lips when she was thinking, returning it there after writing a sentence or two. It was interesting to watch her study; it felt like he was observing her in her natural habitat. Every so often she would brush a strand of hair behind her ear, but it never stayed there. It was cute that she kept trying.

"You know, Harry," she said after a while, not looking up from her notes, "if you're going to stare at a girl you should try to be a little less obvious about it."

"Sorry," he muttered, suddenly conscious of what he had been doing. "I didn't mean to be..."

"It's ok," she said, cutting him off. "Something on your mind?"

As a matter of fact there was. "Don't you think McGonagall was acting strangely?" he asked. "It almost seemed like she was happy when she was walking away."

"Professors are allowed to be happy, Harry."

"No, I mean she seemed happy about what was happening. About us being stuck up here."

"I'm sure it was about something else," she said, rather tersely. She scratched out her last sentence.

Feeling as though the conversation was over, Harry shifted so that he was facing down the stairs, towards the floor dozens of feet below. He looked around the hall, his eyes flitting between the many paintings on the walls. A couple of the inhabitants of the paintings waved at him; one or two gave him a knowing wink that Harry could make neither heads nor tails of. Harry looked everywhere except at Hermione. He tried to, anyway. Every so often his eyes would drift back to her, like she was a magnet, before he snapped them away again. Each time he caught just a glimpse of her, a flash of light reflecting from her sleek, brown hair, or a snapshot of the expression on her face as she puzzled her way through a particularly difficult section of her work. Maybe it was just because he was alone with her, floating above the ground, but Harry started to realize something. She really was beautiful. Not in the boring, common way that some girls were, not in a way that many boys would necessarily find beautiful, but something else, something that, to him, was even more intoxicating. It was in the way she devoted herself to things, to her work, to her friends, even to S.P.E.W, wholeheartedly, without reservations, without caring about what other people thought of her. It made her the most interesting person he knew. He could have sat here with her, talking or not talking, it didn't matter, for days before he would have even started to feel tired of her.

"Hermione," he started, turning to look at her. He was acting on pure instinct, not even thinking about what would happen if she said no, or even what could happen if she said yes. He just knew, with a certainty that surprised him, that this was what he wanted. "I was wondering.." he hesitated for a moment, fortifying his courage, "I was wondering if you'd like to go to the ball with me."

She looked up at him, a slight smile on her face. "I think I would," she said, the smallest hint of excitement in her voice.

"Great," Harry said, suddenly at a loss for words, "that's great."

He had a date for the ball. He was going to the ball, not just with anyone, but with somebody he really cared about. With Hermione. He felt a charge of confidence and contentment flow through him. He felt like he could take on anything, even another dragon, even the ball itself, which he had been dreading for a while now, if only she would be by his side.

Harry was so caught up in his excitement that it took him a second to notice that the staircase had started to move again. About time, he thought, as he and Hermione walked up to the common room. Little did he know that the staircase (and Professor McGonagall) were thinking the exact same thing.


End file.
